Origin XT Blog

Not because its chips are the best mass-produced consumer computer processors, not because it is the biggest manufacturing company in the Silicon Valley, not because it is one of my most favorite companies, but because its stock results don’t reflect reality.

I bought Intel when it dropped below 21 (I got it at 20.91, I think) on Friday, after the huge tumble down thanks to unfavorable oil price fluctuations. I was pretty confident 21 is pretty much as low as it can go, with such a bright future ahead of it: AMD’s losing market-share, nVidia’s inevitable obsoleteness (as Intel rolls out chips that eliminate the need for an independent graphics core), and its new Metal-K technology combined with 45nm wafer-etching abilities. It probably can go higher in the next few days, but the immediate result is abysmal.

In the morning today, Intel announced a teraflop capable processor that runs at 62 Watts! That basically allows any willing consumer to purchase a supercomputer that uses half the power normal desktop chips use (If you were to get a supercomputer network this fast, you would need a huge room full of processors). This could replace whole datacenters with a pair of servers running these chips, and reduce power usage by data networks by 98%. Intel stocks inched up a bit from the opening price, and strangely, tanked after that.

This is what doesn’t make sense to me–here, the company unveiled the most powerful chip and the most ambitious invasion tactic to date, but the stocks tumble on the positive news. What’s going on? If stocks were more predictable than typical brownian motion maybe I wouldn’t be jumping all over the place. Do you have any major experiences with inexplicably illogical stock movements?